I've been eating Laksa for breakfast for
some time now, both curry
laksa and Penang laksa. I make it from pre-prepared pastes, and in principle things work well. But I had a
couple of jars of this stuff which I apparently hadn't used:

Maybe the label put me off: “Thai style Laksa”? It's Malaysian! The recipe shows that it's
like a curry laksa, though the obfuscatory quantities (“use half a jar and add...”) made it
difficult to calculate. And of course there was no reason to believe that the quantities
were correct. The jar contains a round 230 g, compared to 200 g for Tean's Gourmet paste, from which
I get four servings. That matches the recipe only in the number of servings: they'd have to
be about half the size of my portions. But for that, they wanted 2.5 times the amount of
coconut cream, or 5 times for the same quantity!

OK, use the paste, with my quantities. Wrong! It tasted of nothing. Today I put in
another jar of paste and a 400 g can of coconut cream into the remainder, leaving four
portions. Yes, it didn't taste as bad any more. But definitely not like laksa. That's the
last time I try that stuff, and using up the last jar turned out the be an advantage: now
there's none left.

First day of spring today (and the 18th anniversary of
keeping this diary online). And it rained, which seems to be a tradition: it's been
60 years since my mother told me that, as if it were a
law of nature.

Mick the gardener along today in spite of the rain, finishing off the arches, and planting
some Cannas on the east side of the
shade area:

The network connectivity continues to be bad, so updating my Olympus software wasn't an
option. But I had to do something about my camera's configuration, so I tried to load my
settings again. And this time it just worked!

Why? I'm guessing that the firmware update program doesn't store the firmware on the host
computer: it connects the camera directly to the net and then downloads the software from
the remote host. What happens if the net connection goes down during the transfer? Bricked
camera? Hopefully it first stores the firmware on the camera and then updates it only when
the download is complete and (hopefully) when the checksum is correct. But what a
ridiculous way to do things! And there's absolutely no need for a network connection for
loading the saved settings.

On the whole my transition to object storage has proceeded very well, but I keep coming up
with strangenesses. Today is was the house
photos. Yes, it works fine here, and it it works fine out in the global Internet.
But there it claims that the last photos were taken on 18 August.

Why? Because those are the last photos that I uploaded to the server.
My PHP scripts check for the presence of the
files and look for the most recent one if necessary. Another thing that I need to fix, in
this case by checking the photo lists for the day. Some time. Does anybody even look at
these photos?

Last week Nikon introduced
the Nikon Z7, its first serious
mirrorless camera. There are plausible rumours
that Panasonic
and Canon are doing so too, and that
they'll be here before the end of the month.
And Olympus? More rumours, a
new top-end camera before the beginning of next year. What sensor size? The rumours dry
up.

I've been following this development with interest, of course. Now that the bottom has
dropped out of the market (there are, effectively, no cheap point and shoot cameras any
more), what has happened to the prices of serious cameras? I would have expected them to
drop, but instead they're going up. Tony and Chelsea Northrup have come out with a
discussion of where the market is going to go: MIRRORLESS WARS (their
capitalization):

Their conclusion: The Micro Four Thirds system is going to go away, and Olympus and Panasonic with it.
They see Sony as the survivor. I've noted
in the past that Tony, in particular, is very negative about these systems, but it's worth
bearing in mind.

Time will tell, of course. Why do people want “full frame” in the first place? As far as I
can see it's more marketing than anything else. When I chose Olympus 11 years ago, it
wasn't because of the (then unexpected) mirrorless support, it was because I thought the
smaller sensor was the way to go. And I still do. My best guess at this stage that this is
part of the reaction to smart phones killing off the bottom of the camera market.

And what does this choice really mean? Sony has two different sensor
formats, APS-C and full frame. Yes,
B&H list 155 full frame lenses. But what are they? The longest telephoto is the
(impressive) Sony 400 mm f/2.8, not yet on the market, but which will be available for USD
$12,000. And that's the longest that Sony make (along with a single 100-400 mm zoom).
There's a Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Lens for Canon EF and MC-11 Mount
Converter/Lens Adapter for Sony E Kit for only $1,238, but that's the lot. Nothing to
compare with my Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3, which would have to be 200-800 mm in full
frame format.

And other kinds of lens? Only a single fisheye lens, made not by Sony but by Rokinon. By
comparison there are 10 for Micro Four Thirds, including one by Olympus and one by
Panasonic. With macro lenses it's different: 14 listings for Sony compared to 7 for Micro
Four Thirds (2 each Panasonic and Olympus). But here the three entries for Sony-made lenses
prove to be only two different lenses.

And lenses with an aperture wider than f/1? For Sony there are 5 entries, which prove to be
3 distinct lenses, and all f/0.95. There are also two f/1.2 lenses, none by Sony. For
Micro Four Thirds there are 5 distinct items with aperture f/0.95, and also the Handevision
40 mm f/0.85. And there are 8 lenses with f/1.2, including 3 by Olympus and 1 by Panasonic.

So maybe the comparison isn't so bad for Micro Four Thirds after all. My recollection is
that Olympus was still the biggest shipper of mirrorless cameras, but that Sony was catching
up. I wish I could find good figures. CIPA has
some, but I haven't found anything by manufacturer.

Paella valenciana for dinner
today. One of the things that I have never done “right” was to cook the paella uncovered,
like you're supposed to: I was worried that the rice wouldn't be cooked properly. OK, time
to risk it. In the oven with heat only from underneath and without a fan to dry things out.
And within 5 minutes it started smoking!

Not a sign of burning. The smoke must have come from above
(chorizo?). And this time I had put 2 g
of saffron in instead of the 1 g I had
originally intended. It certainly improved things, and I'm wondering if it can handle even
more. When you consider that saffron is normally sold in packets of 0.4 g, 2 g is already
quite a considerable amount.

The only thing that didn't work out was our guest, who insisted on drinking red wine with
the paella:

Juha Kupiainen is idly thinking of buying a camera. He came up with the new Panasonic DC-LX100 II, for
the princely sum of USD $999.

Why? It has a Micro
Four Thirds sensor, but it only uses 85% of the area. It doesn't have interchangeable
lenses. But then the price seems to be par for the course: Sony has a Cyber-shot DSC-RX100
V for $899, and Canon has a PowerShot G1 X
Mark III (who sas that only Olympus can create stupidly long names?) at $1,299. Why
are they all so expensive? After reading the reviews, I still don't know. The Canon lens
is pretty boring at an FF equivalent 24-72 mm f/2.8-5.6. That compares badly to the
standard Olympus 14-42 f/3.5-5.6 (28-84 mm FF equivalent), which is available for under AUD
$100. Suggested the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II, the one that Chris Bahlo has. They're only half the
price, though without a lens. But at least they have interchangeable lenses.

Our area seems to be popular with off-road bikers, but functional exhaust systems seem not
to be as popular. At weekends we're frequently assaulted by the noise of five or ten of
them shattering past the house.

On the whole they're polite enough when we meet them on the road (usually walking the dogs),
but today we had an exception: somebody came down Stones Road from the north (where, I
suspect, he lives), drove down far too fast towards Yvonne and Nikolai, and then decided to go between
them and the side of the road, just as she was moving to one side. He nearly hit them, and
also nearly fell off his bike. When I shouted “Slowly!” at him, he made a rude gesture and
shot off towards Bliss Road, where he turned around and gave me the finger.

I didn't get a photo—next time I'll turn the camera on when I see one coming—and he didn't
have a rear license plate. All we got was his path:

What do we do now? Public shaming via Facebook? This kind of kid obviously has no understanding of social responsibility, and I don't
overly like the idea of some retaliation on our property. Call the police? Clearly he has
committed a number of offences, and the lack of registration would be the easiest to prove.
But how do we find him? The best would be if his parents were to take some action.

The availability of the network over the weekend has been really bad, and some of the video
downloads that I started yesterday morning didn't finish until 3:00 this morning. And then
at 12:50:56 we went off the network completely for (just) over an hour.

Why? Things worked well after that, so maybe it was hardware maintenance on the radiation tower. But oh! for a reliable network!

Finally got round to filing away all my old pension paperwork. We have a total of 5
pensions between the two of us, and it's a lot of paper. And then another letter
arrived. My pension card for the next two years: “BEND &
PEEL TO REMOVE CARD”. OK, do that. That's a funny back to the card, just rough
paper. Look again. BEND & PEEL again. Get the other
half:

Clearly a suboptimal way of doing things. In the past they were just glued to the sheet of
paper, and it was easy to remove them. If they want to do it this way, they should at least
make the cards out of plastic.

Should I contact Centrelink? That way madness lies. How important is it? I hardly use the card anyway, and I can
just keep both halves. I wonder how many people will make the same mistake.

Why indeed? Arguably a thing that made the adoption of the metric system more difficult
were the relatively unhandily sized units. For all their faults, old systems had modified
their units to have more handy sizes (thus possibly adding to their warts).

Went looking and came up with more questions than answers. It seems that the first draft of
the metric system, in the law of 1 August 1793 (« Pour Hâter La Réforme, Des Mesures
Provisoires ») had the metre we know and love, but the unit of volume was a pinte (a cubic
decimetre), and the unit of weight was a grave, the weight of a pinte of water at 0°,
corresponding to the modern kilogram. There was also a gravet (1/1000 grave, modern gram)
and a bar (1000 grave, modern tonne).

The name of the pinte changed first to cade (with the decree of 19 January 1794) and then to
litre (law of 18
Germinal, year 3, 7 April 1795), here in more legible form.
But the grave changed differently: the law of 7 April 1795 replaced it with a gramme, equal
to the old gravet, so the grave was named the kilogramme.

I've found this in many places, but what I haven't found is: why? Clearly the people who
thought out the decimal system of measurement (« Le système métrique décimal ») had
originally thought that the grave was the more appropriate unit of mass. Why did they
change?

In passing, it's interesting to consider « le système métrique décimal », from which we get
“metric system”. « Système métrique » simply means “system of measurement”, like all the
ones that preceded it, including the archaic system still in use in
the USA. The important thing about this
metric system was that it was decimal. And exactly that distinction got lost.

Since yesterday's outage the network connectivity has been back to normal. Finally got a
reply from Aussie Broadband support: they've been overwhelmed by new customer calls. Hopefully that doesn't mean that
their support will stay that way.

The explanation: problems with
the BallaratPOI
that were resolved on Friday. OK, what does that have to do with the problems I experienced
on Saturday? About the only thing of interest was that in case of further problems they'd
rather see an mtr (implicitly) to 8.8.8.8 or 202.142.142.142 (the latter of which
resolves to dnscache1.wide.net.au).

Spent some time—too much time—modifying
my PHP scripts for the house photos to modify the check for the presence
of photos. The script contains the date of the most recent photo series, but I don't always
take photos from each view. So it goes backwards through a second
file, photo-dates.php, which despite the name is just a list of the dates on which I
took any photos. For each photo it then checks if this photo was taken on that date.

Those are the names of the photos, defining the order in which they are to be displayed,
along with the dimensions (width, height and size in kB) of the “tiny”, “small” and “big”
images. So all I need to do is compare the file names from exterior.php with the
names in photolist.php. How hard can it be?

I assume that DK is David Kaiser, but I have no evidence. In any case, how do you compare?
Library function, of course. Which? strcmp ()? That only works if both
strings are the same length. strncmp ()? That would have done it, but I
missed it, maybe because the
manual describes the functions in alphabetical order rather than by related function.
strstr ()? Returns a string or NULL (or is that FALSE in
PHP?). Might do it. Let's try,

The script looped, and it took 30 seconds to get... nothing. OK, a judicious application
of exit () after the first loop. And somehow things just didn't work. By the
time I gave up, I must have had 10 different print calls in the script to show what
was going on. And basically it seemed that strstr () was misbehaving: even
with this silly === construct I couldn't detect whether I had a match or not.

Finally, in desperation, I chose preg_match (), which worked, but I really
don't like the overhead. Can I be bothered to go back and try strncmp ()?

CJ Ellis along today with his motorized hole digger to put in a couple of posts for another
trellis at the other end of the bed at the north of the garden. Not much work, but a
certain amount of thinking. I didn't want to hit the downpipe, so I put the first post a
bit to the left, and the trellis will be at a slight angle. I could have made it straight,
but then the entrance from the gate on the left would have been somewhat tight.

The other thing that was surprising was that the second post was beyond the boundary of the
bed. At the other end, it was inside. But the post was in the right place; the bed is
crooked, 30 cm shallower at the end than at the other:

While he was here, CJ complained about the fact that he couldn't find anything on Gmail any more. Where's the spam folder? Took a look.
Indeed: Gmail has changed their appearance and navigation, and it's difficult to find things
now. It took me a while to understand. CJ, non-technical and 80 years old, doesn't have a
chance.

Why do they do these things? From my point of view, it's significantly worse than before.
But nearly everybody in the Microsoft/Apple/Linux do this all the time. It seems that
intuitive navigation isn't that
intuitive after all.

I use a fair amount of software for special functions, but certainly doesn't do everything
I'd like done. In particular there are two things I'd like to be able to do well: add text
to images and remove irritating objects, particularly annoying in the case of these photos,
which I won't be able to retake so easily:

A more important thing, though, was the photo of my pension card on Monday, where I tried to use
DxO PhotoLab to obscure the card number. That was only marginally successful. Yes, it was obscured.
But it was still legible, and I got a message from Tim Bishop pointing it out, so clearly
people notice.

OK, what other software do I have? GIMP, of
course. Out to search for gimp remove objects, which
came up with a whole lot of hits, including a number of YouTube videos. Tried the first, which was
Microsoft-centric. It required a plug-in, for which she obligingly gave the
URL: registry.gimp.orgforward
slashnodeforward slash27986. OK, let's get that first. No route to http://www.registry.gimp.org. More network problems? No, another web search
suggests that it's been offline for months, but the (old) contents have been
saved, so I downloaded them.

Finally found the plugin, resynthesizer.tar_0.gz, and downloaded it. How do I
install it? The suggestion was to unpack it into in a specific directory, in this
case ~/.gimp-28/plug-ins. Did that, but gimp wasn't interested. Why
not? Round about here I started to lose interest.

OK, try another one, which
doesn't need any plug-ins. But how horribly tedious it is!

I've tried to make friends with GIMP for over 20 years now, and I've continually
found it frustrating. The fact that the plug-in registry has been down for months suggests
that I'm not the only one. Time to look for something more powerful and less annoying.
Another search, photo
remove objects, came up with lots of hits bordering on the insane, like 5 Free
Android Apps to Remove Unwanted Objects from Photos and Best 5 Apps to Remove
Unwanted Objects on Your iPhone (I would have thought that a soft tissue would do the
trick for the latter).

Finally came up with Zoner Photo Studio, which I
have tried before. It pointed to this PDF document, which looked good, but of course it was only advertising. OK, try
downloading again.

Install, and as usual I see a tasteful display of dark grey on darker grey and lots of
puzzlingly named tabs, along with old non-favourites like import, export and develop. Also a link to http://learn.zoner.com/, promising all sorts of help.

But nothing that looks like my object removal. The PDF flyer talks of a “Fill with
Surroundings tool”. OK, search for that on the web site. 28 hits, arranged 9 to a page,
and all false positives. Clearly this site can't replace the manual.

But where is the manual? Both the learn site and the main http://www.zoner.com/ are silent. But there's this “chat” thing, so tried that:

Finally I got him (Jiří Kokeš, reduced to Jiri in the chat window) to send me the URL,
http://download1.zoner.com/binary/zpsxhelp_en.pdf. That's 111 pages,
so it'll take me a while to read it. Also got the chat, in which Jiří's first reply
appeared as:

And yes, there is a link on that first page. Did I maybe load via a different page? In any
case, looking back, I see that this isn't the first time that I've had problems with this. But maybe it's time to try a
little harder.

How do they compare? Maybe I'm just losing interest, but the Canon seems boring. Slow—only
8 images per second. Yvonne'sOlympus E-PM2 can do as much,
and it's a 6 year old entry level camera. The touch screen is apparently glacially slow,
which would concern people who used things like that, but it makes it rather silly to use it
to try to set one of the 5,655-position (count them, 5,665! What can you do with that?)
Dual Pixel CMOS AF positions.

There's a new mount of course, the EF-R mount, by no means as impressive as the new Nikon
mount. For me, the
flange focal distance and
opening are the most important. Canon's 20 mm focal distance is the longest of any serious
mirrorless camera, while the Nikon has only 16 mm. To add insult to injury, the EF-R and
EF-M mounts are incompatible, meaning that there can never be adapters. And unlike Nikon,
it doesn't have In-body
image stabilization.

But that stops with the lenses. Here are the Canon and Olympus with the f/1.2 lenses. The
Nikon (currently) can't compete, but its 50 mm f/1.8 lens is bigger than the Olympus f/1.2,
let alone the f/1.8:

And of course things are even more obvious with long telephoto lenses. I still can't find
any native 800 mm lenses for Nikon (Sigma makes one), but Canon has one. So does Panasonic
with the Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3. And there things start to look
significantly different, even before you look at the price:

Adam Kranzel contacted me about this. Yes, Nikon does have an 800 mm lens, at least on paper:

Like the Canon, it's f/5.6, compared to f/6.3 for the Panasonic. It's also currently
out of stock at Nikon, which suggests that it's not a big seller. The price could explain
that. It's interesting to compare some of the basic statistics:

Clearly you can expect better image quality from the Canon and Nikon lenses—if you can
get beyond the camera shake. But how many people can afford that sort of price?

To be fair, the Leica lens expands considerably at full focal length, but it's still much
smaller than the Canon. So somehow the reasoning for the smaller 4/3 sensor still makes
sense. Bodies can be made smaller (and I expect that Olympus and Panasonic are working on
just that for their top-of-the range cameras), but lenses can't.

But that leaves a black field. It would be more elegant to replace the number with the
background pattern.

Reading the documentation is like reading a man page. It describes every detail without
explaining why it was implemented like that, or how to use it for any useful purpose.
And either I have missed something important, or the program doesn't behave as
described, in particular keyboard bindings (“shortcuts”).

I found this video about the use of the clone tool, which I had thought would be useful. But no, it takes
an area and allows you to smear it elsewhere—if you can find the correct key gestures.
I couldn't. But the video was for version 12, an old, worn-out magic word. Now they
have version X, which has a completely different interface.

I have licensed copies of versions 17 and 18 (the latter appears to be an error on the
part of their license validator). This suggests that X > 18. They, too, have
different interfaces from the others. Four different versions, four different
interfaces. Only yesterday I ranted about the annoyance of continually changing user interfaces. Zoner seems to
take it to extremes.

On the positive side, it found the GPS location information in my photos and produced
map previews for them. That could be useful.

So: should I give up? Not yet, I think. But the combination of continuous change in
appearance and the subscription-based model of version X tells me to stick with version 17
or 18 and forget any upgrades.

Into town for a number of things today, but on the way decided on yet another item: finally
do something about the induction stove (“cooktop”). In principle I had settled—more or
less—on the Bosch PIJ611BB1E with a large 3.7 kW element on the left. But so far I have completely
failed in determining whether I can even connect it to my fragile “modern” electrical setup
(only 50 A/11.5 kVA maximum). I would need to connect it to at least two 20 A circuits; the
alternative would be very expensive rewiring. And Bosch is too polite to put such details
in any of its manuals.

Dropped in at The Good Guys, though
their pricing (round $1,600) was considerably more expensive than the prices I have seen on
the web ($1,150 odd). So I said so. In the meantime the price was at $1,399, but she was
prepared to give me one for $1.098, (written) offer good for a month. Surprisingly, they
had exactly the model on display, so I asked about the power connection. No, sorry, can't
lift the thing, but I'll check... And of course she couldn't find the details either.
Called up some central information person and was told single circuit, don't know how many
amps. That doesn't ring true. She called in a colleague, who lifted the cooktop up and
showed me the underside. See? Only single phase. And there seemed to be no indication of
the current needed.

Damn. Took a couple of photos anyway. That was well worth the trouble:

On to Bunnings, where, to my surprise, I
found everything I was looking for, mainly a couple of trellis panels for the garden. About
the only thing of interest was the (self) checkout. I had just scanned a roll of drip hose,
and I wasn't sure that I hadn't added two of them. Looking at the (tastefully obscured)
display at first confirmed that I had two of them:

But no, those were the lattices that I had scanned in first. These idiots display the
purchases the wrong way round! But only
on the screen, of course. The receipt printout is the right way round. Why
do people do these things? Is it just because it's modern?

Then on to get the ducted vacuum cleaner repaired. About a month ago it started making a
lot of noise, and it smelt overheated. After cooling down it still didn't sound right, so I
decided to call the suppliers, “Hi-Teq Communications”, so hi
teq that they don't have a web site, but whose phone number ((03) 9335 1033) was
conveniently put on the side of the unit. They had given me the number of a Colin (Newitt),
0418 303 975, who is only sometimes in his shop, and I had arranged to take the unit along
for examination. They also conveniently gave me the real model number: it's not an HT-600
as stated on the unit, but a rebadged Monarch 550. And the unit had a 3 year warranty,
which has thus run out a couple of months ago.

Got there, and he wasn't there, but he arrived almost immediately. Took a look at the unit.
Yes, motor has had it, might last another few weeks, but that's about all. Repair will cost
$380. That's a whole lot more than the $270 that Hi-Teq quoted me, but they would also want
$120 to come and fix it.

More thoughts. How much does a new one cost? $550. With 6 year warranty, compared to 12
months on a replacement motor. And then he puzzled about the model. They're made in
various sizes, and this one (Monarch 550) was too big for my “20 square” house.

So why did JG King install it? Idiots,
he says. Yes, I can agree with that, but it's not a sufficient explanation for them to
install something bigger than needed. My guess is that they had a job lot of them, and so
it ended up cheaper for them. It seems that the sizing is done not by size of the house but
by the number and lengths of the ducts. So I pulled up the plans (isn't it handy to have everything on the
web?), and he confirmed that not only would a (slightly) smaller unit do, it would be
better.

So in the end I got the new unit for $500, including a few new bags, 5 years of warranty,
and saving on picking up the repaired unit. That's still a lot of money. Why did the old
one fail? Two reasons: firstly, it seems fairly clear that the builders used the thing to
clean up the floors before moving in, and they didn't have a bag. Thus this silt in the
bottom of the unit (here seen from below):

It seems that builders like to do this, and so Colin refuses to install them until the house
is ready for handover.

But there's another possibility too: there's a switch on the unit to turn on the motor.
That's handy when connecting a hose directly to the unit, which doesn't have a switch
contact. But what nobody told me is that if you turn it on without a hose, you can
burn the motor out pretty quickly: it needs the air flow to keep cool. But where's that on
the device? All I see is (old and new units):

And in the “instructions”? That's even simpler: they don't even mention the switch. So how
can any poor consumer to know of the dangers? It would be as simple as writing (preferably
in legible, non-reflective script) WARNING do not run motor without
a hose connected. The motor will overheat. They could also, of course, add
We're too cheap to include overload protection.

My world view is very much tied to the four dimensions: time and place. This diary is an
expression of the former, but place is also very important to me. For me, one of the nice
things about watching films on TV is to find out where they happen, and having a computer as
a TV means that whenever I see anything on TV, I can check it on a map.

A couple of weeks ago, we were watching „Die Kanzlei“, and I got a better opportunity:

But I had never been in the area shown on the phone map, nor did I recognize any of the
buildings. So how do I know? I really don't know. Maybe the names of streets named after
composers helped jog my memory.

Yvonne saw an advantage, of course: “Where did we buy that
hay in Ross Creek a while back?”.
Yes, I recalled that, and with after a while found that it was on 27 November 2009. But that was only once. How
did we get there? Somewhere from the north, down Sobeys or Lacys Road, south along a road
that went through some light forest, then right, and along a long curved driveway to the
house with a barn opposite. Can Google Maps help? Yes! Here's the driveway and the house in the SW quadrant:

Put the coordinates into my GPS navigator and off there today, without any difficulty beyond
the normal map bugs. Found the husband at home, but I needed the wife (Stephanie), who
wasn't there. He gave me a phone number to call. Yvonne can
do that.

Off back home. Which way? The map clearly shows that this is a junction of four roads, and
the one I came on was the least obvious: it led directly in the opposite direction from
where I wanted to go. OK, that's what GPS navigators and Google Maps are for. I had
already noticed the first discrepancy: the road to the west of the junction, Stonier Road,
is supposed to be 1.44 km long; in fact, it only reaches about 130 m to the entrance of the
property. Beyond that it's a track that would probably not pose any problems to people on
horseback. Here the view west:

Google Maps was no better, at least yesterday: it wanted to take me down the same roads.
When writing this article they had disappeared. It would be nice to believe that it was
because it know knows that the routes are impassable, but I suspect it's more likely to be a
function of the phase of the moon.

I took two photos of the induction cooker with my Olympus E-PM1.
But when I read them in, I had one raw image (as set) and one
low-resolution JPEG image, only 1280x960.
How did that happen? Hardware malfunction? I took more photos (of the Bunnings checkout
and the vacuum cleaners) after that, and they were all correct.

As if the new announcements from Nikon and Canon weren't enough, Fujifilm has now
announced the new camera, the X-T3. Do I care? I don't think so. Nikon and Canon were interesting for two
reasons: first, they're the world's two biggest manufacturers, and secondly they're each
their first serious mirrorless camera, ones destined (I think) to replacing
their DSLR lines. Fuji's latest has neither
of these distinctions. About the most interesting thing about it is how much it looks like
a 1960s SLR:

I feel rather sorry for Fuji because of the timing. Clearly they weren't expecting Canon's
announcement. I wonder how many more cameras will be announced in the near future. There
are vague rumours of Panasonic and Olympus jumping on the bandwagon, Panasonic maybe later
this month.

We had brochettes for dinner this
evening. What's the English word? Spit? Skewer? Wikipedia likes "skewer”, but like
“spit”, that really relates to the rod that you put the meat on, not the dish itself.

More to the point, though, how do you prepare them properly? Probably the best way is over
a charcoal grill. We've been using the toaster oven in the past, but this time Yvonne chose skewers too long to fit. OK, big oven. Heat to 180° on
grill, then turn up to 200° and insert the brochettes near the top. They didn't brown very
quickly, and in the end I left them in for about 11½ minutes, after which they still didn't
look very brown:

I had grilled from one side only, and the top two brochettes show the side that was grilled.
They're barely any browner than the other three, where the underside is up. But they were
cooked enough, possibly fractionally more. Maybe I should really get some kind of grill for
them.

I frequently geotag my photos, though it's seldom that important. But clearly yesterday's navigation attempts were a
problem. And of course the geotagging worked fine—except for exactly those photos. “Time
out of range” or some such.

Dammit, what's wrong? Checked the logs. This photo was taken at 15:12:41 local time,
corresponding to 5:12:41 UTC.

What's wrong with that? Some subtle format error? Tried downloading the log from the car
GPS, but that didn't help either, though it did greatly irritate me. I really need to find
a better way to convert these formats than GPS
Visualizer, which is a typical clumsy web application.

The dates are all in 2019! And then it became clear: I had adjusted the camera's time this
morning (off by many seconds), and had accidentally set the year to 2009. All the rest was
correct, so it wasn't immediately apparent. Thank God for resetdate.

A couple of months ago I
made steak and kidney pie, and we
had plenty of filling left over, which we put in the freezer in individual portions. Today
we thawed out two portions and baked them, this time will puff pastry.

The big issue with any kind of pastry in a form is: how do you get the base cooked properly?
This is also an issue with pizza, where you put them
directly on a pizza stone. That doesn't work here. Tried it on the induction cooker with a
metal plate underneath:

Eggs Benedict for breakfast today.
Well, sort of. It seems that it
requires English muffins, in my
experience an American food item (with which Wikipedia concurs), ham
and sauce hollandaise. The way
Yvonne makes them, we have none of those. Toast instead
of American English
muffins, sauce mayonnaise instead of
hollandaise, and salmon instead of ham. In fact, apart from the eggs, there's not much in
common. Here's how Yvonne and I served them:

Some days, like yesterday, I seem to do an enormous
number of things. On others, like today, it seems that I did nothing.

Well, one thing that I try to keep transparent is the amount of time I spend writing this
diary. Clearly it takes time, and it's one of the reasons why there tends to be a lean day
after a fat day. But it's worth (for my sake, anyway) thinking of how I spend my day:

8:00—9:00

Get up. Read mail, random things in the office.

10:00—11:15

Prepare and eat breakfast.

14:00—14:30

Walk the dogs.

15:00—16:00

Watch TV news.

18:30—19:30

Prepare and eat dinner.

19:30—22:00

Watch TV. Go to bed.

That really doesn't leave much time for anything else. Do I care? No. But it's worth
understanding.

Received an email from Fotozones today.
What's that? I thought it was the makers of Zoner
Photo Studio, but it seems to have nothing to do with them. It contained a link to a
lens review, but when I selected it I got:

And when I was done, all I saw was “Banned” again. I was rather surprised to get a response
from the person who runs the site, showing that he was unaware of such problems, and we
exchanged head-scratching a couple of times. He has now remove the emetic contact form,
replacing it simply with the email address. But I still keep getting BANNED!

Mail from Dallas, the person behind Fotozones, suggesting that my IP address might be in a spam list. OK, even before checking, that's
easy: I have two browsers running on different displays (and thus circumventing firefox's “There can only be one rule”)
that use proxies on different continents. And how about that, it worked!

It's been over 8 years since Peter Jeremy brought me some
cuttings of his Curry tree. Most of
them died, but one survived and has had a somewhat chequered life. Once again it's
suffering from mites, and it occurs to me that it might be a lot happier outside. Peter
says that they will survive outside, but that's
in Sydney, where it's generally warmer,
and also in a town, which is usually warmer than in the country. But I'm not going to risk
it, and I don't have to: there are plenty of suckers waiting to be transplanted. Tried to
remove two of them, but ended up with four, so I put two pots indoors and two outdoors:

Once again the water isn't really hot in the morning. That's not the first time: it seems
to happen at the end of every summer, though on closer examination it didn't happen this
year. But this time it happened in early spring.

Out to examine the circuit breaker on the hot water system. No, it had not tripped. This
flaky switch? How do you tell? First you need to provide power to it. Off to the meter
box to turn on boost, carefully avoiding the
resident redbacks.

Back and tried. Still nothing. Was it this flaky rotary switch that doesn't quite ratchet
"on”? How do you tell when the boost is on? After some messing around, discovered that the
low-contrast LCD display briefly displays on or off, thus proving that I can
turn it off as well. But more to the point, discovered that the solitary circuit breaker,
for the hot water, had tripped:

This is horrifying! The USA has (tried to) put itself above international
jurisdiction! And it seems that the closure of the Palestinian representation is in
retaliation for their attempts to get the ICC to look
at Israel's human rights violations.

The US Americans are very proud of their government and its separation of powers. The
executive has no say over
the judiciary—in the USA, and despite
Donald Trump's attempts to
change the status quo. This statement from Bolton it
tantamount to a declaration of war against the international community. No wonder China and
Russia are currently playing war games, though clearly the timing has little to do with
Bolton's threats. Why is the international press taking it so lightly?

More searching for ways to remove object from photos brought me to this
page, describing Inpaint, and
suggesting that things would go relatively easily. Downloaded, and yes, indeed, without
any RTFM I was able to transform my kangaroo
photo:

Run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour. It's not perfect by a long way: the fence line in front of the
horses is still there (a first attempt to remove them removed much of the legs as well), and
the replacement for the post in the foreground is less than convincing:

I've been planning to migrate my web server for some time, but there hasn't been any
particular urgency (apart from the US $35 that I pay for it every month, which I can reduce
to $5). But maybe one's coming
up: Hurricane Florence is due
to hit the Carolina coast
tomorrow. www.lemis.com is
in Raleigh NC. Will it be hit?
Probably not. But it won't do any harm to be prepared, so today I tarred up those parts of
the system that I need and moved them to ffm.lemis.com, at a snail's pace:

Why did it take so long? I'll find out: I'm planning to set up another server as well,
probably near Los Angeles. I would
have preferred somewhere in Silicon
Valley, but ping says no. Here ping times in milliseconds:

To

From eureka

From www

From ffm

sjo-ca-us-ping.vultr.com

196

74

156

lax-ca-us-ping.vultr.com

177

64

148

OK, setting up a FreeBSD system is becoming
easier all the time. But migrating the infrastructure is something that I still haven't
simplified enough. What I see at the moment is:

Copy /etc/ and /usr/local/etc/ for the configuration.

Create a list of services that I want to run on the server. These include the web
server, mail, rsync, named
and ssh. I also have MySQL
and webmin running, though I
currently don't see why. To do this right I need a list of ports to install. Probably
I need to structure it by server function.

You ONLY need to remove the IP Address from our list if you are running an
outgoing mail server.

(If you do NOT run an email server on this IP address, then being on this list
should not affect you or your ability to send email through your email
provider.

If you ARE running an email server, your PTR (reverse) DNS is the problem.

180-150-113-90.NBN.mel.aussiebb.net

Translated, this means: “Tough, we're not going to do anything about it”. They don't seem
to have considered the fact that the presence on the list is negative enough by itself, even
if it doesn't affect operations. I had mentioned in my message that I am not using that IP
address for email, but who reads messages? And what's wrong with the reverse mapping?
Nothing, according to their own web page:

Between 12:15:04 and 14:09:06, 6842 seconds, the server generated 5501 such error messages,
an average of one every 1¼ seconds. That's amazing, especially since the check is only for
a comparison image in those few cases where I have a mouseover alternation. But looking at
the code, it seems that I check in any case. So it seems that I get about 50 image requests
a minute! I really need to get logging working again.

Why did it happen in the first place? To make the tarballs, I set the permissions for the
(still existing) photo directories to 0 so that they would not be included in the tarball:

One of the strangest differences between food in Germany and Australia is the colour of
potato skin. In Germany, it have a relatively uniform beige colour independent of type.
But in Australia the skin is frequently reddish, even in varieties that I know from Europe.
Today I started cooking some huevos a la
tigre, and found that I needed to open a different bag of potatoes, of noticeably
different colour:

But not only are they ostensibly the same
variety, Désirée, they're even
from the same supplier. So why the difference in colour? And why is the image on the
Wikipedia page show potatoes with red skin? The first image appears on the Google search
result for the Wikipedia page:

Arne Koets is coming to town at the
beginning of next week, and Yvonne will be participating in a
clinic. She has asked me to take some video. OK, fine. I bought some Saramonic UWMIC9 microphones
especially for that sort of thing over 2 months ago, and I have never used them. High time to practice.

A good thing, of course. The big thing that worried me was volume control. They have a
scale between 0 and 30, with a default setting of 27. But trying them out, they didn't seem
to make much noise: the receiver showed only about 3 out of 5 bars. OK, set to 30 and see
what happens.

I mounted the camera on the new ball head that I bought only a little later. The image looks
good:

It also proved not to be as smooth as I had hoped. Do I really need to spend Big Money for
a good ball head?

But the real problems were very different. Apart from the jerkiness in this clip, thanks to
the ball head, what happened to the focus? Irritatingly,
the Exif data contains no useful information
about the camera settings, but it was set on C-AF (constant autofocus) with the single
central focus point. But it lost focus and couldn't find it again:

I took two other clips, not really worth keeping, and it didn't happen again. But why?

And the sound? Better than we have had, but still too much rustling. Also, Yvonne found
that the transmitter was obstructive; we'll have to find a better place for her to put it,
possibly in a pocket or pouch.

The real issue, though, was that my transmitter powered down after the second clip, and
Yvonne's had a temporary dropout in the middle of the third clip. Looking at the batteries,
they're all NiZn, and though my
transmitter showed full voltage both before and after, and indeed it was over 3 V for two
batteries, one of the batteries was showing only about 1.45 V, while the other was showing
1.7 V. I think it's time to decide that NiZn batteries need to be recharged long before the
devices show “low battery”, maybe round 1.6 V per cell. In the meantime, I should take
along a number of backups, including normal non-rechargeable batteries. The transmitters
don't like NiMH batteries: even when
fully charged they show a “battery low” indication.

I follow your diary via an RSS feed and recently (since your move to
Digital Ocean for photo storage) I'm frequently seeing images not
loading. I've just debugged a little further and I get a failure
accessing this URL:

Over the last few days I've been trying to make a new batch of huevos a la tigre. It's a surprising amount
of work: I've calculated that I need 170 g of potatoes for a single serving, so that's only
6 per kg. Just cutting a kilogram of potatoes into small cubes is work. And how do I cook
that much? I tried in a kuali, but that
didn't cook them through, even though I covered it. So I put them in a big pot and cooked
them in the oven at 180° for an hour. That was too warm, though they survived: next time
I'll do 130°.

Next, the eternal question: how to cook the eggs? I've established that grilling them
creates leather (thus the rationale for splitting
from huevos
a la flamenca). Past attempts in the microwave have been equally unsuccessful. How
about steaming?

Yes! Why that? Its (only) content looks like a Microsoft executable, and it wasn't
compressed, so there's no obvious reason to tar it up. And what Microsoft system can
understand that?

Some discussion on IRC. It seems
that WinRAR
and 7-Zip both understand tar, so it
could work after all. And possibly virus scanners don't investigate tar archives, so
this could be a way to bypass them.

Yesterday was a really nice, mild day, with a top temperature of 22.8° (purple line):

But that was yesterday, and just today things changed dramatically:

The highest temperature of the day was 18.1°, but that was in the early hours of the
morning. From 7:00 on the highest temperature was 10.1°, and a couple of times it dropped
under 2°, reaching a day's minimum of 1.4° in the late evening. There was a lot of rain and
worse:

Why? The Phalaenopsis is barely showing any growth this year, and it'll be a while before
the Cyclamen shows any flowers. And I had thought that this winter had been milder than
last year.

The Clematis that I planted last spring
are coming, but very differently. While the one on the trellis in the north (Edo murasaki) is
growing happily and sprouting leaves, the one on the fence to the west (General Sikorski) is barely showing any growth:

Margaret Swan is in town again, another excuse for Indian vegetarian food. I had intended
to make masala vada, and I
started before I discovered I was supposed to drain the stuff for 24 hours before
continuing. So I put the pulses aside and made alu tikka instead.

And that, too, was much more work than it should be. There must be an easier way: after
all, they're just fried vegetables.

Today was one of those strange days with lots to do and little to show for it. Somehow
cooking Indian food makes the kitchen look like a bomb has gone off, and by the end of the
evening things weren't looking too much better. That's at least partially because of the
preparations for tomorrow: Yvonne is feeding not only
herself, but also Arne Koets and
friend, and also Chris Bahlo and Margaret Swan at tomorrow's clinic. Today she prepared the
food.

And I still have the job of taking video. That's nothing new; we've been taking (lots of)
video since 1984, but those were clips, and I've decided to take a whole 40 minute session
of Arne teaching Yvonne. How do I do that? I still don't know. Probably badly, or at
least, not to my satisfaction.

The first issue is the venue itself: a covered arena, open at all sides. I've been there
before, and it makes exposure almost impossible. Today the sun was shining, so things were
even more extreme. Manual exposure? How do you even do that with video? Dragged out the
E-M1 manual and discovered that yes, indeed, it works pretty much the way it does for
stills. It wasn't until I got to the venue that I discovered that this doesn't work for the
E-M1 Mark II, because the menus are different, and the “Super Control Panel” doesn't allow
you to set this detail. So for that I tried an exposure compensation of +2 EV, which looks
like it worked well enough.

The rest still didn't work well. Despite all my attempts, Yvonne's microphone scraped against her clothing, making unpleasant scratching
noises. And once again I had problems with both microphones. Yvonne's stopped working for
no obvious reason; when I checked it was still on, and after power cycling it worked again.
Later, Arne's powered down. Once again it showed full battery on being powered up. But
back home I discovered that one of the cells was showing about 0.9 V. Could it be that
something similar but not so catastrophic happened to Yvonne's microphone? I tested it and
found no issues.

That was with NiZn batteries. Last week I established that
NiMH batteries are not an option:
even when fully charged they show a “battery low” indication, though a repeat test showed no
problems. Admittedly, some of the NiZn cells are getting rather long in the tooth: I
started using them seven years ago, and
some may be getting tired. But I can't rely on them if they fail so silently. So it looks
like I will have to use non-rechargeable batteries in the future, at least for the
transmitters.

Apart from that, it was anything but plain sailing. I'm gradually coming to the conclusion
that the much-hyped autofocus of the E-M1s is inadequate. Tracking doesn't: on some
occasions it jumped to a different horse in the distance. There should be heuristics that
make that less likely. On other occasions it got completely lost in the corner of the image
(outside the AF sensor area?) and stayed there, presumably something like the problems I had
last week. About the only
good thing is that I discovered that, despite disabling the touch screen, I was able to
touch the area I wanted in focus, and it worked immediately. But what kind of algorithm
leaves you with a red square in the corner of the viewfinder (“I can't get into focus, and
I'm not going to try”)? Under those circumstances, and given single focus point mode, you'd
expect it to always be better to go back to that focus point and try to focus there. I'm
very impressed, but not positively.

Was that all? Of course not. For some reason the E-M1 (the one that I just left running)
stopped recording for no obvious reason after 22 minutes, 3 seconds. Start again and it
worked. And on one occasion the E-M1 Mark II got so annoyed, presumably because it was
completely out of focus, that it stopped reacting at all, and I had to remove the battery to
stop the bloody thing. One way and another, not the smooth recording that I had expected.

And finally, I lost the lens cap to the M.Zuiko Digital 45
mm f/1.8. Where did it go? My best bet was in the corner of the arena where I put up
the tripods, but search as I might both there and elsewhere, I couldn't find it. But when
the others came home, they had the cap with them. Yes, it had been in that corner.
Presumably it had been covered in sand.

But it was too early, and it died. I had got the plant from Avalon Nursery, not far from Three Barns, so I
dropped in there on the way back. No, sorry. Picked up
a Alyogyne huegelii that smiled
at me, and that was all.

The week before last I got
an offer from The Good Guys, valid for
a month, for a
Bosch PIJ611BB1E
for the surprisingly good price of $1,098 instead of the standard $1,399. And then I got a
special offer email for kitchen gear from them. OK, check what they're offering. How about
that, exactly my chosen cooker—for $1,089. OK, time to buy. Dropped in today, but they
didn't have them in stock. Ordered one, and was rewarded with a price of $1,050.

The list price is $1,699. Why are they selling them (and only this model, it seems) so
cheap? Because there are only 3 cooking areas? To make up for that, the one on the left is
28 cm in diameter and can deliver up to 3.7 kW. That doesn't sound very big, but it's much
larger than the standard 16 or 18 cm, and the heating surface of my largest frying pan is
only 26 cm. But maybe people don't think that way. On the other hand, it could be a
coincidence. The best price I can find on eBay is still $1,159.

While waiting to be served, the person in front of me came along with a 4 handset Panasonic
cordless phone like the one that I had been looking at a couple of months ago. Price $139.
Doubtless I could get one cheaper on eBay, but
here I could get better customer service and return it if I had significant problems. So
off to get one, but couldn't find it. The only one they had was the display model, which
they sold me for $115 as a result. It wasn't until I was on my way home that I realized I
hadn't checked the specs. And at home I discovered that it doesn't have mobile phone
coupling, the only reason I wanted a new phone. So it'll have to go back after all.

It took all day! It's easy to forget how much 15 GB are, but at my upload speed of 5 Mb/s
it's nearly 7 hours. The good news is that the upload speed was nicely pegged at pretty
much exactly 5 Mb/s. Less easy to understand is why the third clip, “only” 860 MB, took all
day, while others uploaded much more quickly.

The 15 GB were only my contribution. Yvonne took even more.
Together we took 31,781 MB of photos. That's about a quarter of all the digital photos I
took in the first 10 years.

In passing, it's interesting to note that Yvonne is gradually learning the advantage of
better lenses that she usually has on her camera. Yesterday she used the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 and the Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6. For some reason she preferred the latter because it
had a longer maximum focal length. But on checking I discovered that only one of the 214
photos she took had a focal length greater than 60 mm, and then only 63 mm.

So it seems that Linus Torvalds is
taking time off from Linux. You can understand that,
considering that it has been his life since he was 21 years old, well over half his life.
But it seems that his main issue is anger management.

Elsewhere I've seen another example, not so much anger as offensiveness: Thomas Modes, (now)
the lead and maybe only developer of Hugin. Somebody on the mailing list asked for information on
scripting Hugin, something that I had looked at in some detail a few months ago. So I
answered:

> I see that in regular Hugin Stitcher tab I can add command line options for
> enabled, but I don't see a way to do that for nona. So that means using
> terminal I suppose. Is there a tutorial on command line?

Rather to my surprise, I got an answer from Thomas Modes, with whom I have had issues
before:

Sorry, but is wrong. The main part with the description is up to date. The
only one obsolete program in the main part is autopano-sift-c - but this is
only shown as alternative; the mentioned main program cpfind is still part
of Hugin. All other program are still there. Maybe in the list at the end
there are some obsolete programs, but not in the main part.

The next time be more precises what you are referring instead of make such
general and diffuse statements.

OK, Thomas is German, but “is wrong” is not even correct German. Most of it is OK, or so he
claims. OK, do away with diffuse statements: I checked about half-way through the page and
found that there are references to autopano-sift, match-n-shift, ptoinfo,
ptscluster, ptoclean, ptovariable and panostart, as well as to
the file pano.mk that no longer exists. In the “Full list of
command-line [sic] tools”, only 5 of the first 10 tools still exist. The page also
currently contains the line:

autopano - Keypoint matcher, part of autopano-sift-c and not to be confused with autopano

Well, I'm confused. Beginners certainly will be. Maybe Thomas has a different definition,
but for me this is very out of date.

The real issues, though, are Thomas' attitude: he's trying, come what may, to defend
the status quo, in the process being rude about it. He comes across as offensive and
inaccurate. This attitude also greatly reduces people's willingness to cooperate in the
project. A few years back a whole lot of people were involved in the project. Now he seems
to be the only one. It would be easy to get the impression that his attitude has something
to do with this.

This isn't the first time I've had issues with Thomas. Looking back, I find it's been going
on for years: in February 2013 he changed a document that I had written to refer to a different, not-yet-released
version of Hugin, meaning that it was useless to any end user. Later he introduced a kludge
that broke building under FreeBSD: the object
hierarchy must be distinct from the source tree. Why? To fix an issue with building
one part of the documentation. It could have been solved correctly, but for Thomas, this
was good enough. And in general, every time I mention an issue, he finds a reason why the
current situation is preferable—to him.

That's enough for me. I don't need this kind of treatment. I'll let somebody else fix the
document (which probably means it will never be fixed). My issues with relatively normal
panoramas will need extremely good documentation to be accepted as real problems. After
all, these two photos are equivalent, aren't they?

The amplifier in my office is flaky: from time to time one or the other sound channel drops
out. And somehow I regret having paid the princely sum of $30 for it. So when today I saw
an offer for a “Sanyo Stereo (with 2 large speaker, it has a turntable, tape deck and FM
radio)” on Freecycle, I jumped at it. Left
my phone number, got a call back. Yes, it's mine,
in Learmonth.

Where's that? Over 50 km away, onn the other side
of Ballarat. The last time I went there
was 7 years ago, where
coincidentally we went to pick up a piece of furniture that proved inappropriate. Looking
at the map, it seemed that it might even be the same house as last time.

Off there anyway, and was left being led through a particularly untidy garden to the house
next door. The system is definitely not what I expected:

Still, the loudspeakers look good, and it might come in handy, though it's clearly not
suited to propping up a monitor.

But while I was there, I found various other things outside the house, with a sign “Free”
next to them. A couple of corner stands and a wicker stool similar to one that Yvonne already has, and something like a miniature grandfather clock,
only 50 cm high. Here first the old stool, then the new:

So I took the lot, with the exception of a vase of which I didn't like the look. On
reflection, I should have taken that too and left the choice to Yvonne. Clearly my choice
was good: Yvonne didn't notice that the new stool was different, and asked why I had moved
it. And the clock proved to be battery-driven and functional. We don't know where to put
it yet.

My main purpose for the excursion today wasn't the stereo system: I had lots of things to
pick up in Ballarat. But by the time I
got to Bunnings, I had forgotten nearly
all of them. All I found on my shopping list was herbs, gas and duct tape.

Duct tape was no problem, but gas was an insurmountable one: I had left the old cylinder at
home. Herbs were also an issue, not helped by Bunnings' signage:

Last Saturday I gave up on
making masala vada because I
didn't have the time. Miraculously, the soaked pulses hadn't gone bad by today, so I
finally got round to completing the dish. But it's so difficult! I'm supposed to grind the
pulses in a food processor. What was I thinking of? I noted to add enough water. How much
is “enough”? Today I measured it: 275 ml water. What does that do to the consistency?
Surprisingly, it turned out not to be too bad. I had previously given up on deep-frying
them, and the recipe showed my attempts:

Watching a film about the Stasi on TV this
afternoon. They mentioned the Minox “spy
camera”, carefully omitting any reference to the fact that it made in West Germany. And
some detailed photos. It was a Minox A, with one wheel less than my Minox C:

In fact, the first image isn't a Minox A. It's a “Minox Riga”, made
in Riga before the war. And mine was made
some time in the 1970s. If that's all the progress they had in that time, it's no wonder
that they folded.

But why the third dial? Opened the thing up and discovered a battery. It does have
an exposure meter! And the battery (nominally 5.6 V) still shows a voltage of 5.4 V. How
old is it? I don't think we've ever used it. My father gave it to Yvonne years ago—he's been dead for nearly 10 years—and I don't think she ever used
it. But not only does it contain a battery, it also has a film in it! Of course, opening
it doesn't help, but it's a cassette, so maybe we should finish it and find someone to
develop the film.

All the videos I have seen show PTGui to be very much like Hugin, but that must have
been a previous version. Now it's even more Microsoft-like. Still, the “Load images...”
tab was clear enough. Reading in the images was straightforward enough, but then I got this
strange popup:

PTGui needs to know whether the images were taken with a fisheye lens or a regular
[rectilinear?] lens, but this could not be determined from the EXIF [sic]
data. Please tell what kind of lens was used:

Exif Lens: Generic 8 mm f/1.8 fisheye on E-M1MarkII

OK, PTGui, what's generic about the Exif
information “Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8m f/1.8 Fisheye PRO”? And what's unclear about
both the original Exif data and the interpretation? It seems that PTGui has issues with
Exif that go beyond the spelling and spacing.

Told it what it already knew, and it went off and detected the control points correctly and
in about a tenth of the time that Hugin'scpfind takes.

Next to crop it. It offers me a “Panorama Editor” tab. It must be in there, but how can I
tell?

Why would I ever want that? And why is it trying to be a window manager? The answer's
simple, of course: Microsoft still doesn't have one.

And how to crop? I still don't know. Moving the image seemed to move in the opposite
direction from what I would have expected, and it was quite slow compared to Hugin.
And I couldn't find any way to crop it.

In the end, I gave up and saved it as-is, putting up with silly names with spaces in them
and ending in .jpg. When I later tried to save an image as foo, it disobeyed
my instructions and called the file foo.jpg. Here compared with the Hugin
result:

Later I went through the tutorial videos, part 2 of this link, for which they're too polite
to supply a direct link (it's https://youtu.be/bEI1CJoMLcY). They
show a very kludgy way to crop by changing the appearance of the display image (sliders to
left and right), but that keeps the image centered in the same place. Surely there must be
some better way; in principle I could just crop it later, like I used to. But not a very
professional impression for something for which they want at least 99 €.

Loaded it, and it found the control points correctly, again in record time. But I need to
mask it, and PTGui masks completely differently from Hugin, at least as far as
I can see, and as far as the tutorial tells me: wipe over the area you want to remove, with a very nervous and
fuzzy brush. That could make sense, but in this case it proved very difficult. At the very
least I need to know how to slow the brush down.

Looking at the features list, it
seems that only the PRO version of PTGui offers any kind of masking. And that
costs double the price of the base version. So far I haven't seen anything that justifies
that cost.

Comparing Hugin and PTGui, the main issue (apart from speed) seems to be the
unreliability of Hugin's control point detectors. I wonder if the project files are
still compatible enough for Hugin to process a PTGui project file. I can't
check that: the trial version doesn't save the project file in canonical form, which
suggests that yes, Huginwould understand it.

If there's one thing that defines a camera system, it's the interface between camera and
lens, the lens mount. Cameras and lenses may come and go, but the flange remains.

Now that new mirrorless cameras are coming out thick and fast, it's worth getting an
overview. There are two important things about the flange: the distance from the focal
plane and the diameter. The smaller the distance, the better, and within reason, the
greater the diameter, the better. But where do I get the details from? This page gives the distance,
but I need to look up the diameters myself. Here's what I have:

It's interesting to note how much wider the newcomers are. The Micro Four Thirds system seems positively archaic by comparison. And the Leica L-Mount is interesting because there
rumours are circulating that Panasonic and Sigma are going to produce cameras with that
mount. No mention so far of Olympus.

The recipe suggested (only) 300 g of chicken breast for two servings. That seemed too much
for me, and I ended up with 200 g of mixed chicken and pork, and added some chopped spring
onions. Still too much. But it didn't taste too bad. Also, despite the description, it is
not hot at all.

Yesterday Yvonne drew to my attention that one of
our birch trees is not showing any signs of
recovery from the winter. It's difficult to get a photo, but clearly the one on the left
has new leaves, while there's little to see on the other one:

But they still haven't flowered in the nearly 3½ years that we have been here.

So could it be that the soil is the problem with the birch and the Paulownia? The birch
that is suffering is considerably larger than the one that (still) looks OK. Could it be
that its root system has grown down and struck granite clay, and then given up?
We know that there's clay 80 cm down, but could that kill a tree?

Closer examination and comparison came up with a different potential solution, though: the
Paulownia doesn't produce leaves this early; last year they started round the beginning of
November, only to get frozen off by a late frost:

One thing that this does say is: it's too early to plant
the Hibiscus and tomatoes that I had
planned to plant soon. Instead, prepared some pots with soil for the tomato seedlings.
I'll leave them inside to warm up and then plant them tomorrow.

After yesterday's recognition of the dangers of planting out too early, decided to pot the
tomato seedlings that I bought last Thursday. I had only
really needed two, maybe three plants, and clearly there were more here. But I was still
surprised to find that there were 12 of them!

They're a cultivar called “Sweetbite”, early maturing cherry tomatoes, presumably the same
thing as Yates “Sweet
Bite”, which are sold as seeds. I wonder if they're any different from the volunteers
we got last year. Yates claim that they're “smaller than normal cherry tomatoes, fruit is
produced in clusters on long branches”. We'll see.

That was a reference to my article
on Minox on Saturday. And sure enough, they weren't visible on the external web site.
Normally that's because I forgot to sync my local copy, but in this case the images were
from WikiMedia.

So why did they display locally and not on the external site? My guess was that it was due
to the lazy display code I use:

But I had set the access mode for all /grog/Photos/*/tiny/ to 000, so clearly that
couldn't (and didn't) display. But why should that stop the display of the external image?
Reset the permissions of /grog/Photos/20120628/tiny/, and all was well. I still
don't understand why.

I have a number of images in these hierarchies to which I refer explicitly in my code,
notably my photos at the top of the diary pages. Time to go through the code and fix the
references.

What's a Wonton? It's not a word that I
hear much any more, and it seems to have a US American overtone to it. In fact,
it is a valid word, referring to a kind of dumpling like
the yum cha dumplings that I bought
recently in Geelong.

We had no less than two packages of Wonton skins in the deep freezer, and today Yvonne decided to make some Wontons. I had my doubts: Yvonne tends to
approach cooking from a decidedly European viewpoint, and the use of things
like Noilly Prat didn't reassure me.
But the results were good, even if she insisted on baking hers:

Letter from Juries Victoria today. Letter?
No, a summons. “You have been summoned for jury service and are required to attend”.

In principle I'm rather looking forward to the idea. But looking at the details dampened
that enthusiasm: It's in Geelong, 80 km
away, and I have to be there by 9:30 in the morning. That would mean that I would have to
get up in the middle of the night. And it starts on 11 October; the following week we have
two medical appointments, one of them
in Melbourne and requiring significant
advance booking. The summons makes it clear that I should have 5 to 7 business days
available for the duty.

Why can't they give me jury duty
in Ballarat? That's what I would have
expected.

They include a form to apply for deferral, requiring a signature by
a Justice of the peace.
That would require a trip to Ballarat!
But they have the alternative of a web application, designed to annoy with one of these
particularly emetic CAPTCHAs:

After running that gauntlet, I discovered that I had multiple reasons for deferral, some
sufficient for permanent exception: I'm more than 60 km from Geelong (something that their
choice algorithm should have been able to determine), I'll be over 70 years old (called
simply “advanced age” on the paper form), and I have the medical appointments.

But that doesn't interest the form. There can only be one. It took the first one I entered
(more than 60 km away), and that was that. No modifications, no additional questions,
apparently no way to modify the entry. If they decide that that's not enough, I have to go.
And if I do, I face additional issues:

I might be able to get a parking permit. Otherwise I'm liable for parking fees of $6
a day, along with the costs of running the car, which I estimate at $0.60 per km. That's a
total of $112 a day, which far exceeds the $40 that I get paid. I can't afford it!

People, it's difficult enough to get people who are prepared to be jurors. Why chase away
the ones who want to do the job?

Read today, the story of stupid thieves. They stole GPS tracking devices! And if that wasn't
enough, one of them also managed to cut himself while stealing some drinks from the company
fridge, leaving blood samples and fingerprints. If you're going to be stupid, go the whole
way!

Is it really so difficult to add text and real photos? No. The instructions are in 15
languages, but they're all represented elsewhere in the document, requiring the installer to
page back and forth.

It also included a 5 conductor cable to connect it to whatever power source I choose, so
it's puzzling that the person who installed the display model at The Good Guys thought that it was a single phase
model.

Starting with the first image required removing what proved to be a cable clamp, held in
place with a Torx screw. That proved to be
more complicated than I thought: none of my bits fitted. It wasn't until I looked more
carefully that I discovered that some of my bits were for 5 lobed Torx, something that even
the Wikipedia page doesn't describe.

Finally interpreted the instructions and put in the cable in single phase configuration:

The Earth conductor is longer than the other, which makes sense given the position. But the
ends are all too long, resulting in having to bend the wires to fit. Surely they could have
adapted the cable to its intended position.

Closed the connections and off to try it out. Bang! It tripped
the RCD in the garage.
Coincidence? No, it happened a second time. Was it really the RCD and not
the circuit breaker? Yes,
tripped a third time and checked the flag.

Damn. What could have caused that? Yes, connecting a device like that via a 10 A connector
is not exactly appropriate, but it worked for the last one, and as long as I don't use more
that 10 A it should work. I could even overload the plug and draw the 20 A for which the
circuit breaker is rated. But tripping an RCD when I just connect it? Can that be right?
Checked the connector to the plug, but there's nothing obviously wrong there:

So today (or yesterday at the other end of the world), Donald Trump got up on his hind legs
before the UN General
Assembly and preached... isolationism. And of course he couldn't resist making the
claim that his administration had achieved more in two years than “almost” any other
administration. That's ridiculous, of course, and that's what happened (20 seconds in):

World leaders laughed openly at Trump! Sadly, it's not clear that he understood.

Yesterday I complained about
the cost of getting to Geelong for jury
duty. The good news: today I received email telling me that my request for deferral has
been accepted. I wonder if the next request will require me in Geelong (since the distance
was the only reason that I could state in my request).

I guessed at $0.60 per kilometre for the cost of getting there. What's a good sum? In
Germany that's simple: the taxation people recognize a specific sum to be deducted from the
tax. A Google search for Werbungskosten Kilometergeld brought me immediate results: 0.38 € in Austria, 0.30 €
in Germany, along with the information that the correct term is Kilometerpauschale

Our burnonff pile burnt for two
days: there was a big tree stump in there that we started burning two years ago, and which Robert Hill of
the CFA had suggested was a “20 year project”.
But today it was gone:

Part of installing the new induction cooker is to replace the worktop around it, and also to
find a 30 cm wide gas stove for things that the induction cooker can't do easily.
Yvonne had brought some samples of worktops, but it sounded
like a good idea to go into town and take a look together.

Off to Ballarat Joinery
Supplies in Old Creswick Road, where we saw lots of stuff, none of it inspiring. But
Yvonne might be right this time in wanting a light-coloured surface: I just need to be sure
that it won't mark too easily.

Then to Bunnings to look for random
stuff: pyrethrum, a ceiling light and a
replacement gas cylinder. I've already established that pricing for pyrethrum can range by
a factor of 100:1, and I had already established that Hortico was the best. “No, we don't
carry that”. But I bought it last time. So no purchase today.

The same thing happened with the ceiling light. None fitted my relatively simple
requirements: “oyster” shape, two E27 sockets. They had oysters with fluorescent tubes,
oysters with LEDs, oysters with one E27 socket, and a single one that would have fitted the
requirements had it not been so ugly. Again no sale. Back home, somewhat frustrated, and
intent on searching the web. Now if only the web vendors would provide the information I
need!

On the way home drove down Misery Creek Road as far as Orchid Track. This time last year there was
a lot to see, but this year there's much less, maybe because it has been so dry. I was
mainly looking for orchids, but found none. It's interesting to see the
fresh Eucalyptus leaves against the
sun, though: